Butler Ellis Parker
Swatty: A Story of Real Boys
“I’m goin’ to lock you in there,” he said; “and I’m goin’ to leave you in there to starve, like the dirty sneaks you are. I’ll teach you to go tellin’ lies about me! You’d go and say I stole that can of powder, wouldn’t you? Well, I didn’t steal it – see? I bought it. I bought it and they sent me over to get it. It’s none of your business, anyway. You sneakin’ rats!”
Bony started to cry. Slim told him to shut up, and he did. He scowled at us.
“No, by” – something – he said, swearing; “starving is too good for tattle-tellin’ rats like you. Somebody might come and let you out. I know what I’m goin’ to do to you. I’m goin’ to lock you in and then I’m goin’ to set a fire and blow you to a million pieces. I’ll blow you up, like the sneakin’ rats you are!”
I can’t make it sound the way it sounded to us, because I can’t swear the way he did. He swore, to show he meant it, and then he slammed the iron-covered door and we heard the iron bar scrape as he put it across the door, and we heard the padlock click into the staple. We were in the dark, darker dark than I was ever in before. Bony began to cry sort of funny, like a sick animal with a voice that was too weak to cry very good. All I can remember was that I put out my hands and felt Swatty and hung onto his coat with both hands.
I hung on and held my breath and waited for the explosion to come. We heard Slim cracking sticks across his knee; we could hear the sticks snap. Then we heard him piling the sticks against the outside of the powder house, and pretty soon we heard scratch! scratch! – like a match on a box. It was the hardest waiting for anything I ever did. Waiting to be blown up is always like that, I guess.
The place where he was piling the sticks was one of the front corners of the powder house, and there wasn’t so very much powder in the house, and what there was was in different piles, for the different kinds and sizes of kegs. All of a sudden Swatty pushed my hands off him and stooped down and began feeling on the floor in the corner where the fire was going to be. There were four or five little kegs of powder in that corner and Swatty began picking them up and putting them on one of the other piles that was not so near the corner. I guess nobody but Swatty would have thought of doing that; but when he started I started, too, and we moved the powder as fast as we could. Then the door opened.
Slim had taken off the padlock and the iron bar so quietly we hadn’t heard him, and when he opened the door he caught us shifting the kegs.
“Come out of there!” he said. “Now you know what I’ll do to you if you go telling about me. If I ever hear you have mentioned my name, or if you ever say it to each other, I’ll get you and bring you over here and finish this job right!”
Well, we guessed he’d do it.
“I’d have done it now,” he said, “only I don’t want to blow up powder that don’t belong to me. And here’s the keg I had,” he said, throwing one into the powder house. “Now, you get! And if you ever say a word you ‘ll know what ‘ll happen to you. Get!”
We ran. We ran like scared deer, and all I wanted to do was to get as far away as I could. We ran a long way up the Slough and then Swatty stopped, and I stopped because he stopped, but Bony kept on running.
“Come on!” I said to Swatty. “What you stopping for?”
“Hide in there,” he said, pointing to some bushes. “I’ll come back.”
He crouched Indian fashion and went toward the Slough and out of sight. It was quite awhile before he came back.
“Garsh, he’s a liar!” he said when he came back. “That keg of powder he stole wasn’t the one he put back. He’s got that one in his skiff yet. It was another one he put back.”
“Swatty, you ain’t goin’ to tell on him, are you?” I asked.
“You bet I ain’t!” he said. “I just wanted to know. You bet I ain’t going to tell; if I did he’d stab us in a minute.”
Well, I guess we waited round an hour before we went home, and then we were mighty glad there was any of us left to go home, because we had all thought we were going to be blown into such little pieces nobody would ever find any of us again.
Now about the dynamiters: After I had marched in the prohibition parade because Mamie Little’s father was a prohibition man – there was prohibition in Iowa, all over, and for a while Riverbank didn’t have any saloons because it was against the law. So Slim Finnegan’s father got a shanty boat and started a saloon on it across the river, where there wasn’t prohibition; and Slim helped tend bar, and then other bumboats started, and pretty soon I guess folks got tired of that and the saloons started up again in Riverbank, so people could get drunk without having to hire a skiff and go across the river.
So three or four or five men made up their minds they would stop the saloons again, and they started in to do it. Mamie Little’s father was one of them, because he printed the newspaper that wanted the saloons closed; so one night three or four of the men’s houses were blown up with gunpowder, but the fuse went out on the other keg, so it didn’t blow up its house. But three of them were blown up. That was about three months after me and Swatty and Bony saw Slim Finnegan steal the keg of powder; and right away we thought of that and that Slim Finnegan was one of the men that blew up the houses.
Gee! We was scared! All we could think of was that now Slim Finnegan would come round and stab us, so we wouldn’t tell on him. One whole afternoon we hid in the old box stall in my barn and didn’t dare talk above a whisper; and we had my target rifle, because if Slim came we were going to sell our lives dearly.
But that was afterward. We went to see the blown-up houses first – right after breakfast the morning after the night they were blown up – and they were all pretty bad. Everybody said it was a miracle nobody was killed, and how Mamie Little and her folks walked across the bare rafters and got out, and everything like that. So then the mayor offered five hundred dollars reward and the governor offered a thousand dollars more; and there was a big meeting downtown one night and everybody gave money to hire detectives to catch the dynamiters.
There were lots of detectives came to Riverbank; I guess maybe there were a thousand. Everybody said it would be just a little while before the dynamiters were all caught and sent to prison; but pretty soon everybody began saying the detectives were no good, and that Mr. Murphy, who was the one the committee had hired, was just pretending it was worth while to detect, and that he would never get the dynamiters, and that all he was staying in Riverbank for was to get the money the committee paid him every week. All he found out, I guess, was that the dynamite was gunpowder and that some of it was stole from the powder house across the river and some from the powder houses up the river. But me and Swatty and Bony knew who stole it. That’s why we were scared.
And you bet we were mighty scared! We made a fort in the hayloft of my barn, with loopholes to shoot my target rifle through, so we could flee to it if Slim Finnegan came round, and pop him from behind the fort before he could stab us. Swatty got us to do that. He was going to show us how to fix the barn stairs with each step on a hinge so when we pulled a rope the steps would drop and make a slide, so that whenever Slim tried to come up the steps he would get just part way and then slide down again; but when we tried to pry the treads of the steps loose the nails were rusted and the treads split; so we thought we’d better not.
We got up a signal word – only it was Swatty thought of it – so that when any of us saw Slim we could say it, and we’d know we had to run for shelter to our fort. The word was Vamoose! But it was too long, so Swatty shortened it. He made it Vam!
We did everything we could to get ready not to be stabbed. We made daggers out of some kitchen knives I got in my kitchen, and Swatty showed us how to do it while me and Bony turned the grindstone. We sharpened them on both edges and made points on them and tied string round the handles in loops, so we could hang them on our suspender buttons and let them hang down inside our pants. Swatty showed me how to carry my target rifle stuck down one pants leg, too, so it wouldn’t be visible. It made me walk stiff-legged, like I was lame, but Swatty said that was a good thing – it would throw Slim Finnegan off his guard. Swatty showed us how to stand back to back when Slim Finnegan attacked us, so we would have a dagger in each direction and he couldn’t stab us in the backs.
Whenever we could we got together and Swatty told us new ways to keep from being stabbed, because he said he knew a feller in Derlingport – where he had visited once – who was fixed just like we were, with a big feller after him; and Swatty remembered other things he had done. He didn’t remember them all at once, but every day he remembered a new one. When he remembered them we did them. One of them was to rub our knee joints with sewing-machine oil, so they would be limber and we could run like a deer when Slim Finnegan took after us. Before he got through Swatty remembered a lot of things like that. We did them.
Well, after a while I guess we sort of forgot about Slim Finnegan, because he didn’t come round to stab us. Maybe it was because Swatty couldn’t remember any more of the things the feller in Derlingport had done, and maybe it was because school began again. We sort of turned the fort in my hayloft into a dressing room for a circus. Swatty was ringmaster. So then Bony’s birthday started to come and his mother thought she’d have a party for him, because they had a new parlor carpet and had had the dining-room papered. So she had it.
At first Bony said he wasn’t going to his party, because there would be girls there and they would want to play kissing games; but Swatty said, Aw! he wasn’t afraid to kiss all the girls there were in the world! and that if Bony would go to the party he would go too. So I said if Bony and Swatty would go I would go. I said, Aw! I bet I wasn’t afraid to kiss all the girls in the world, either! only I bet I wouldn’t kiss Mamie Little if she asked me a million times, because she was mad at me. So we went to Bony’s party.
It was a pretty good party. Right at first it wasn’t much because the girls sat on one side of the room and tried to keep their white dresses from getting wrinkled, and the boys sat on the other side. It wouldn’t have been any fun at all, that first part, only Swatty had brought some beans in his pocket and we had some fun shooting them at the girls with our thumbs. Every once in a while Bony’s mother would come in from the kitchen and clap her hands and say:
“Come, now! We must all have a good time! All you boys and girls think of a game and play it. Bony” – only she called him Harold – “I’m surprised you don’t start a game!”
So then Bony wished he hadn’t come to his party. So after a while Bony’s mother said to the cook:
“Well, Maggie, we’d better give them the refreshments now, instead of later; they won’t liven up until they are fed.”
We went into the dining-room and all sat round the big table, and we began to have a good time. Us kids would get up and sneak round and steal a girl’s cake or something, and she would holler and be mad; and then we started in to pull their hair-bows, and maybe their hair a little, and they would slap at us and scold and giggle. They pretended they didn’t like it; but they did. So pretty soon some of them got up and chased us round the table, and after the ice cream it turned out we were playing tag; and Bony’s mother said:
“Heaven save the furniture! But, anyway, I’m glad they’ve waked up!”
Well, I didn’t pull Mamie Little’s hair, or anything. I guess I wanted to, but I sort of didn’t dare. All she did was to make a face at me once across the table, and when I threw a little piece of cake at her she brushed it off her dress and said:
“I consider that very rude!”
So then we went into the parlor again and got to playing kissing games – Copenhagen and post-office, and games like that. So then we played pillow. I guess the girls like it because there isn’t so much game and there is more kissing, and I guess the boys don’t care because by the time you get to playing pillow they’re used to it. You take a sofa pillow and drop it in front of the girl you want to kiss and drop on your knees, and she drops on her knees and then she kisses you. Then she takes the pillow and drops it in front of the fellow she wants to kiss next, and she kneels on it, and she kisses him. So I guess Kate White dropped the pillow in front of me and kissed me; and then I took the pillow and looked round the row of chairs.
I saw Mamie Little and she looked as if she was trying to look as if she didn’t want me to drop the pillow in front of her, but really did want me to. I didn’t know what to do. Toady Williams was in the next chair to Mamie Little. I guess maybe I wanted Mamie Little to kiss me, but I was sort of scared to put the pillow in front of her. I got sort of hot. So, all of a sudden, I dropped the pillow right in front of her and plumped down on my knees. Everybody laughed and clapped their hands, except Toady Williams.
But Mamie Little didn’t plump down on her knees in front of me. She stuck her chin in the air and said:
“No; thank you.”
I guess I got hotter than I ever was in my life. I was burning hot. And I guess I was pretty mad. I got up and held the pillow by one corner.
“All right for you, then!” I said; and all I thought of was to make her sorry for making me look silly before the whole crowd. “All right for you! I know who dynamited your house, and now I won’t tell!”
Well, right away she got down on her knees. She took the pillow from me and got down on her knees on it. So I kneeled down on it, too, and she let me kiss her on the cheek. It was the softest cheek I ever kissed, I guess. So then she got up, and took the pillow and looked around the circle for a boy to drop it in front of, and when she didn’t drop it in front of Toady Williams the very first thing, I felt fine. Swatty leaned over to me and said:
“Garsh! Now you done it!”
“Well,” I said back, “I got a right to tell if I want to, haven’t I?”
“No, you hain’t,” Swatty said. “If you tell then Slim Finnegan will stab the whole three of us.”
“Well, let him stab!” I said, because that was how I felt just then, because Mamie Little had not put the pillow down in front of Toady Williams but in front of Bony, and that didn’t mean much, because it only meant that she wanted Bony to have it next, because he would give it to Lucy. So, when he went to kiss Mamie she turned her head and he hardly got any kiss at all, and she had let me kiss her fair and solid. So I felt pretty good. I felt as if she was going to be my girl again. And I guess she was, because when somebody put the pillow in front of her again, she came right to me with it, and that time it was a good kiss too. I felt great!
When us boys was getting our hats, when the party was over, Swatty came up to me.
“If you tell her I’m going to lick you,” he said.
“All right – lick!” I said. “I ain’t afraid of your lickings. Lick all you want to. I told her I’d tell and you nor nobody else can’t make me a liar!”
So Mamie Little waited for me at the front door, and when I came out I knew she had waited so I could walk home with her, and I did.
“Well, I’m glad we aren’t mad any more,” she said when we were walking along.
“Ah! who was mad? I wasn’t mad,” I said. “Well, I ain’t mad now,” she said. “Who was it blew up our house?”
“Oh, somebody!” I said.
We walked a little way and then she said:
“Who blew up our house?”
“Slim Finnegan,” I said.
“How do you know he did?” she said.
“Because me and Swatty and Bony saw him steal the powder to do it with,” I told her, “We was over in Illinois and we saw him steal it from the powder house that’s over there.”
So we talked about that and when we got home to her house she told me to come up on the porch, and I did; and then she opened the door and called for her father, and he came to the door.
“Papa, this is Georgie,” she said; “and he knows who blew up our house.”
Well, he took me inside the house and asked me to tell all about it, and I told him, and Mamie sat in a chair and listened to me tell it. When he had asked me everything he could think of he went to the door with me and said:
“George, you are a fine boy!”
I said:
“Yes, sir!” and then I said, “Good-bye, Mamie!” And she said:
“I don’t like that mean old Toady Williams.” So I went home.
That evening Mr. Murphy, the detective, came up to my house and Mr. Little came with him; and Mr. Murphy asked me all the questions Mr. Little had asked, and a lot more, and I told him all about Slim Finnegan. He asked where Swatty and Bony lived and how to get to their houses. So then Mr. Murphy said:
“If the boy is telling the truth this may be more important than we imagined. I have thought for some time that the reason Slim Finnegan left town was because he knew something of this affair.”
So I guess that was the reason Slim Finnegan hadn’t come around to stab us – he wasn’t in Riverbank. I guess it was a month more before they found him down in Oklahoma and fetched him back to Riverbank because me and Swatty and Bony had oathed that he had stolen the keg of powder. Petty larceny was what it was called. That was what they arrested him for.
Well, come to find out, Slim Finnegan hadn’t blown up anything, and it wasn’t even his keg of powder that done it. He had stole the powder to load a shotgun with, to go hunting, and he showed Mr. Murphy the dry powder keg, with most of the powder in it yet. So he wasn’t the dynamiter, after all.
But his father was. Mr. Murphy gave Slim Finnegan three degrees and said to him, “I guess you know who blew up the houses and if you don’t tell I’ll send you to the penitentiary for twenty years,” and Slim Finnegan – the mean sneak – told that his father and two other men had done it, and they were arrested and went to prison.
So me and Swatty and Bony talked about which of us ought to have the one-thousand-five-hundred-dollars reward, and we made up our minds that Swatty ought to have it because he was the one that went back and saw that Slim Finnegan was really stealing a keg of powder, and that if Swatty didn’t get it I ought to have it, because I was the one that told Mamie Little, and that if I didn’t get it Mamie Little ought to have it, because if it hadn’t been for her I never would have told.
But none of us got it. Mr. Murphy got it. The only thing Swatty and Bony got was that they didn’t get stabbed. And I got Mamie Little back for my secret girl again.
XI. “THIEF! THIEF!”
While Mamie Little’s father’s house was getting fixed up, after being dynamited, they went someplace else to live, and the only people that lived across the street from us were the Burtons. There weren’t any Burtons to play with, because the only children they had was Tom Burton, who was older than my sister Fan, and that summer he began taking Fan to ride with the dandy horses and carriage the Burtons’ hired man took care of.
The Burtons’ hired man’s name was Jimmy, and everybody called him that except Mrs. Burton – she called him James. I guess Jimmy was forty years old. Or maybe he was fifty, or thirty-five, or something. He was thin and balder than hired men generally are, and his only bad habit was putting angle worms in a pickle bottle and setting the bottle in the sun to dissolve the worms into angle-worm oil for his rheumatism in the winter; but summer was when the worms were, so he had to get a lot of worms in the summer to last through the winter.
Well, Jimmy had been with the Burtons six years and Annie, our hired girl, had been with us on and off, for five years. I guess everybody thought she hadn’t any other name at all until one evening when Jimmy came over and knocked at the back door and asked Mother if Miss Dombacher was home. She wasn’t, because she had gone to the Evangelical Lutheran Church; but after that Jimmy used to come over, and Annie would put two chairs out in the? yard under the apple tree and they would sit and talk. Or Jimmy would talk. He would talk and talk and talk, and every once in a while Annie would say, “Yes,” and, after she learned it, “No.” So, after a couple of years, Jimmy began to hold Annie’s hand when he talked to her, and in a couple of years more they got engaged. I guess they liked each other.
I was in our dining-room one day, looking to see if Annie had put any fresh cookies in the jar in the closet, when I heard my mother say, “Oh, Annie!” in the kitchen, as if she was sorry about something. So then Annie said:
“I bin sorry to go avay, too, ma’am, but it is right everybody should get married once or twice.”
“I know,” my mother said; “but I don’t know what I will ever do without you, Annie.”
So then Annie cried, and there were no cookies, so I went out.
Well, it was like this: Jimmy had been saving his money ever since Annie came to our house and now he had enough to get married on and buy a couple of acres; so they were going to be married, and he was going to leave the Burtons and raise garden stuff and peddle it. Annie was going to raise chickens and sell eggs, and they would have a cow and sell milk.
So now I come to the story part of the story. I guess what the story is about is that sometimes it is a good thing for a fellow to have a girl, because if Mamie Little hadn’t been my girl maybe Jimmy and Annie would never have been married.
There were two parts about the story. One was that a circus was coming to town and me and Swatty weren’t going; the other was that the schoolhouse wore out and they built a new one.
The night before the circus was coming there was going to be a reception in the dandy big new schoolhouse to raise money for a library. Everybody was going to go, and I guess everybody old enough was going to take his girl. Anyway me and Swatty and Bony got to talking about taking girls to parties and receptions and things, and the first thing you know we said we’d do it.
I guess I said Swatty was afraid, and Swatty dared me back, and we both dared Bony, and so we wouldn’t any of us take the dare. So Bony asked Lucy and she said she’d go with him if my mother would let her. When Bony told me I didn’t believe him, but I asked Lucy and she said Bony had asked her, and that Mamie Little was as mad as mad because I hadn’t asked Mamie. So I said:
“Aw! How could I ask her when I hain’t seen her yet?”
“You could, too, see her, if you wanted to,” Lucy said. “You could see her every minute of every day, if you wasn’t a ‘fraid-cat.”
“‘T ain’t so. I’m not a ‘fraid-cat!” I said.
“‘T is so, and you are! ‘Fraidie-cat! You ain’t going to take Mamie Little, and you’re her fellow!”
“I am, too, going to take her!” I said back.
But I wasn’t going to take Mamie Little. I wouldn’t have asked her for a million dollars. But I didn’t have to ask her. I met her that afternoon. She was on the other side of the street and I just went along as if I didn’t see her. So she called across: “Oo-oo! Georgie! You know!”
“Aw! What do I know?” I asked back.
“You know! The reception!” she said. Well, I just went along and didn’t say anything. But that evening when I got home my mother said:
“I hear you are getting to be quite a beau, Georgie.”
I didn’t know what she meant, so I said, “Huh?”
“Mrs. Little called this afternoon,” my mother said, “and she told me you had asked Mamie Little to go to the new school reception with you. That’s very nice.”
I didn’t say anything. It was Lucy, and I was mighty mad at her for telling Mamie Little I was going to take her; but I was kind of glad, too. I thought, “Well, anyway, Swatty and Bony are going to take girls.”
The reception was the next night, so when Swatty and Bony came over the next afternoon I told them I was going to take Mamie Little, and Swatty said that was right, everybody was going to take a girl.
So I asked him who he was going to take, because he had never let on he had a girl.
“Garsh!” he said, “I ain’t going to take any girl!”
That made me sick. Me and Bony had stood right up like men and had asked girls, and Swatty had promised he would take one, and now he was backing out. So I said:
“Aw! You said you would take one!”
“Well, don’t I know it?” Swatty said. “Of course I said I would, but I forgot.”
“What did you forget?” I asked.
“I forgot I was married,” Swatty said.
We were all sitting under our apple tree, out in the yard, and it was a good thing we were not sitting on a roof, because I would have fell off and killed myself, I was so surprised.
“Aw! When was you married?” I said.
“That time I went to Derlingport to visit my uncle,” Swatty said.
“Aw! Who did you marry?”
“A girl,” he said.
“Well, if you married a girl why didn’t you ever tell us about it before?”
“Garsh! I can’t remember everything that happened when I was in Derlingport, can I? Mebbe I forgot I was married.”
“Aw, pshaw!” I said. “What did you want to go and get married for, Swatty?”
“Well, I couldn’t help it, could I?” he asked.
“You don’t think I’d go and get married if I could help it, do you? My – my uncle made me.”
“Why did he make you?” asked Bony.
“Because my aunt had a felon on her finger. She had a felon on her finger and it almost killed her to dam stockings, so my uncle said if I wore any more holes in my stockings I’d have to get a wife of my own to dam them.”
So then we asked Swatty what his wife was like, and he told us a lot about her. She was an Indian princess, and when you first looked at her she looked all right, but pretty soon you saw she had a tomahawk in her belt and the edge of it was all dried over with blood, because she had had eight other husbands before Swatty, and she had got mad at all of them and had killed them and scalped them. She had an album on her parlor table, but instead of photographs in it she had the scalps of her husbands.
Swatty said there was just room in the scalp album for one more scalp, and that every once in a while when he was at her house having his stockings darned she would look at his head and kind of sigh.
Well, we talked it over, and Swatty made us promise never to tell any one he had been married, because if his mother knew it she would take him out in the stable and wale him with a strap. He said that was why he didn’t dare take any girl to the new school reception, because if his wife heard of it she would be jealous and she would come down and tomahawk him and maybe kill him. And if she didn’t kill him his mother would notice his scalp was gone, the next time she washed his head, and would wale him anyway.
Well, my mother helped me dress for the reception, and then she gave me twenty cents to spend. I had five cents of my own she didn’t know about. So that was all right.
It was dark already. I went along, kind of dragging my hand along the pickets of the fences and wishing I was dead or something, and it got darker and darker. The new house Mamie Little lived in was away out over Grimes’s Hill, and when I got to the door Mr. Little and Mrs. Little and Mamie were just getting ready to come out, and Mr. Little said: “Well! Here is our cavalier!”
Mamie and me walked in front, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I kept feeling sort of chilly when I thought of going into the reception with Mamie. But before we got to the schoolhouse Mamie said to me:
“Say, Georgie! Don’t you want a ticket for the circus?”
I said aw, I didn’t want to take her ticket away from her; but she said she had one too, because her father was editor of the paper and he got them complimentary.
As soon as we got to the reception Mrs. Little said: “Now, you children run along and enjoy yourselves.”
Mamie said, right away: “Shall we get some ice cream first?”
I said that would be all right, because mebbe people wouldn’t notice I was with Mamie Little and think I brought her. So we sat down at a table and a girl took our order and brought us strawberry and vanilla – big dishes – and passed us the cake and we took two pieces of cake apiece.
That was all right; but when we were eating Swatty and Bony came past and said: “Ho, Georgie! He brought a girl!”
That was all right for Bony! He had sneaked out of bringing a girl, and that was mighty mean, after he had gone and got me to bring one. I said I’d fix him when I got him, and he was scared, too! So then we ate our ice cream slow, to make it last longer, and I forgot how mean I felt because I had brought a girl, when whoever was opposite us got through and asked how much he owed.
“Let me see!” the girl said. “Two ice creams at ten cents is twenty cents, and two pieces of cake. That makes thirty cents.”
Well, I almost rammed my spoon down my throat! I had never thought about the cake being extra, and we had had four pieces, and that made twenty cents, and the ice cream was twenty cents so it made forty cents all together, and twenty-five cents was all the money I had! I was so scared my throat sort of closed up on me. I guess my face got as red as fire, and I leaned forward and took a big bite of cake, so Mamie Little would n’t see how red my face was, and then I choked on the cake! I guess I never was so choked in my life. And I put a paper napkin up to my face and went out into the hall.
I guess Mamie Little sat there at the table; I don’t know. As soon as I was out in the hall I knew what I was going to do. I squeezed in among the people and got to the door and skipped.
As soon as I got home my father asked me did I take Mamie Little home; so I didn’t say anything. I went right upstairs to bed. After while my father came up and asked me again if I had gone home with Mamie Little, so I said I hadn’t; I said I didn’t want to. I said her folks could take her home if they wanted to. So Father said he had a mind to lick me; but he didn’t. So I guess Mamie Little got home all right. It wouldn’t have helped her home if my father had licked me, but that’s the way fathers are.
